When Snapchat is art

This traveling salesman stays busy by making art in Snapchat. (Shaun McBride/Courtesy of Shaun McBride)

You can only view most “Snaps,” or photos taken with the smartphone messaging app Snapchat, for 10 seconds. So South Ogden's Shaun McBride tries to make his memorable.

McBride, 26, is a sales rep for snowboarding companies who spends a lot of time traveling, and since he was introduced last fall by his six younger, tech-savvy sisters, he's used Snapchat's drawing tool to find humor in otherwise mundane environments.

“He's very creative,” says his wife, Jenny. “He can see something and picture a whole different thing. One of his pictures he has an 'in case of emergency' stairs, and he made a dragon. I would never think to do that.”

On average they take McBride about 20-30 minutes. Part of Snapchat's allure is that the messages only appear on the recipients' phones for brief window, and thus command their full attention, but McBride soon began to take screenshots for perpetuity.

He doesn't have any formal art training, nor does he consider himself a particularly talented artist (though you might dispute that).

“Mostly what makes the snapshots good are the irony of the situation,” he says. A picture of himself between two mirrors, for instance, becomes a roller coaster full of screaming Shaun McBrides.

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The key to detailed Snapchat pieces, he says, is to create layers — because there is only one standard line thickness, an overlapping can give the illusion of variety. Some have accused him of cheating by using a larger device or a stylus, but he swears he only uses his fingers and his Galaxy S 4.